Roundup: Pop Culture & the Arts ... Movies, Documentaries and Museum Exhibits

Palestinian discord over Holocaust concert

TEL AVIV – Wafaa Younis is a woman whose heart is in the right place; she is an Israeli Arab who has made a real effort to help Palestinian children in the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. She started with the boys; she wanted them to put down their stones and learn the violin, in the hope that they would not grow up and pick up a gun. I first met her three years ago when she finally persuaded the Israelis to allow the Palestinian children to leave the West Bank and go

Jimi Hendrix childhood home torn down

RENTON — The demolition crew has been working at a fast pace, and the tiny, 900-square-foot house where Jimi Hendrix lived from ages 10 to 13, and first showed his love for music, was down to its shell Monday. Despite an eight-year, $100,000-plus effort by Pete Sikov — a Seattle real-estate investor who at first wasn't a Hendrix devotee, but became one — the historic structure is gone. If you're a fan, vanished will be the chance to drive by and imagine how it would hav

To Fans, Queensboro Bridge Is a Steel Swan, Not an ‘Ugly Duckling’

This is about history, and not just because Monday is the 100th anniversary of the day the first cars officially crossed the Queensboro Bridge. This is about family history, the kind of history some might prefer to forget and certainly not speak about. Somewhere on the East Side lives an 83-year-old woman who can look out her window at the Queensboro Bridge. This is the history part: The bridge outside her window — a 3,724-foot span of stone and steel and fanciful finials between th

After 650 years, the wisdom of the Alhambra is revealed

Visitors to the Alhambra fortress-palace in Granada have for centuries fallen into a reverie before its intricately carved medieval walls, wondering at the meaning of the Arabic inscriptions that adorn them from floor to ceiling. The script that winds round the filigree arches and pillared courtyards is so stylised that it's often difficult to disentangle words from images, and few can decipher the classical Arabic in which they are written. Now, the carvings have been logged and tr

Henry VIII armour to be exhibited

An exhibition of the most complete collection of King Henry VIII's personal arms and armour is set to open in London. Henry VIII: Dressed to Kill includes a personal suit of armour not seen in the UK for 70 years. The priceless Wilton anime armour of about 1544 is on loan from New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was only discovered to be Henry's in 2003. The Tower of London exhibition marks 500 years since his accession. The Italian made

Nefertiti 'had two faces'

Researchers in Germany have uncovered a secret within one of ancient Egypt's most treasured artworks – the bust of Nefertiti has two faces. A team led by Dr Alexander Huppertz, director of the Imaging Science Institute at Berlin's Charite hospital and medical school, discovered a detailed stone carving that differs from the external stucco face when they performed a computed tomography, or CT, scan on the bust. The findings, published in the monthly journal Radiology,

Titanic museum to open in Southampton by 2012

It is 97 years next month since she went down, but the Titanic - the supposedly unsinkable liner that scraped an iceberg in the north Atlantic on her maiden voyage and sank with the loss of 1,500 people - continues to exercise a huge public fascination. There have been several films and myriad books and documentaries, Belfast has its Titanic quarter around the docks where she was built - and now Southampton, the city which provided most of the crew, is planning its own interactive museum, to ope

The Buoyancy of Depression Entertainment

When the 2008 economic crisis hit, I was surprised at how eager people were to compare it to the Great Depression and brace themselves for the worst. Paul Krugman and Fox News commentators alike speculated on whether cyclical recession would become worldwide depression, and whether unemployment might grow from the forecast 7 percent to 10 percent to reach the Great Depression's jaw-dropping 25 percent. Columnists compared Barack Obama to Franklin Roosevelt and cartoonists showed Obama flashing a

'Dr Zhivago' composer dies aged 84

Oscar-winning French composer Maurice Jarre, who wrote the rich, lyrical scores for films including 'Doctor Zhivago' and 'Lawrence of Arabia', has died in Los Angeles at the age of 84. Jarre's music won him Academy Awards for those classics and for 'A Passage to India', all directed by David Lean. He also worked with directors from Alfred Hitchcock and Luchino Visconti to Peter Weir. "Working with the world's greatest filmmakers, he showed that music is as import

Berlin Wall's famous Kiss painting erased in clean-up

One of the most famous paintings on the Berlin Wall, which depicted the kiss between East German leader Erich Honecker and his Soviet counterpart Leonid Brezhnev - has been erased in part of a clean-up of the surviving sections of the wall. Dmitri Vrubel , the artist, has been told by Berlin authorities: "You can always paint a new one." The Kiss was the star attraction of the East Side Gallery, a stretch of avant-garde murals painted on one of the last rema

Jim Sturgess takes on role as IRA informer in Fifty Dead Men Walking

Martin McGartland’s story is a riveting one. Where he was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s as a stone-throwing youth in the “Beirut” of nationalist west Belfast, the IRA were local heroes. He was not so sure. “Far from defending Catholics, it seemed that the IRA’s first duty was to wound, injure, maim and hurt Catholic teenagers,” McGartland wrote later, in response to the punishment squads that ran the estates. “The older I became, the more their actions angered me, driving me away from the re

TS Eliot’s snort of rejection for Animal Farm

IT must rate as the literary snub of the 20th century. T S Eliot, one of Britain’s greatest poets, rejected George Orwell’s Animal Farm for publication on the grounds of its unconvincing Trotskyite politics. Eliot, a former director of Faber and Faber, the publisher, wrote his rejection in a highly critical letter in 1944, one of many private papers made available for the first time by his widow Valerie for a BBC documentary. When Orwell submitted his novel, an allego

Restorers 'wiped away' precious details from rare William Shakespeare portraits

When the only known portrait of William Shakespeare was unveiled earlier this month, it was hailed by academics and fans alike as taking us a step closer to the true likeness of the great playwright. Experts believed the newly discovered painting, called the Cobbe portrait, which was painted when the writer was still alive, and another version called the Folger portrait had both been altered after Shakespeare's death. But it has emerged that art conservators who joined

Re-Collecting George Grosz's Art

A rear apartment building in Berlin's Wilmersdorf neighborhood; a studio on the top floor; a journey to the past: Art historian Ralph Jentsch holds photos that are more than 90 years old. "Unbelievable," he says. The radiator is still the same, and so is the door. "This is the way it looked when George Grosz painted in this room." It was in this studio where Grosz, the great expressionist, Dadaist and social critic, created the art that made him world-famous -- p

Celebrations Mark 90 Years of Bauhaus

Bauhaus might be turning 90, but for enthusiasts of the German design movement, the art, furniture and architecture it inspired still looks fresh and young. The school was founded in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius, who wanted to create something bold and forward-thinking in the wake of World War I, which he described as a "catastrophe of world history." Gropius was 35 when he applied to the city of Weimar to establish an academy there. By the time he received his permit,

Paintings Attributed to Hitler to Be Sold in UK

Among the 13 pieces to be sold on April 23 at the Mullock's auction house in Shropshire, England, is a self-portrait painted by Hitler when he was a young struggling artist living in Vienna. The watercolor shows Hitler sitting pensively on a stone bridge, wearing a brown suit. His face lacks a nose and mouth, as well as the trademark square moustache. Two years ago, 21 paintings attributed to Hitler were sold for 118,000 pounds ($170,000), or more than twice the pre-sal

Artist Angered by Scrapping of Communist Solidarity Snog

When Moscow-based artist Dimitri Vrubel visited Berlin this week to attend the opening of a new exhibition at the Foreign Ministry called "Born in the USSR," he got quite a shock when he took a stroll along the East Side Gallery, often dubbed "the world's largest open-air museum." It was here, in 1990, that he painted an image on the 1316-meter stretch of the remaining Berlin Wall that fast became iconic. But the clinch between comrades Erich Honec

Will the real Bill Clinton stand up in Peter Morgan's new film?

The funny thing about the news that Peter Morgan's next project will be Clinton/Blair is the realisation that it will be the first time a character called "Bill Clinton" has appeared on film. Funny because moviegoers and TV viewers will be forgiven for feeling they have seen Clinton on celluloid a thousand times before. And in a way they have. Jack Stanton – John Travolta's girl-chasing, hoarse-voiced, charismatic southern governor seeking the presidency in Primary Colors

Is this 600-year-old terracotta bust Leonardo Da Vinci's lost masterpiece?

A 600-year-old terracotta bust discovered beneath a pile of rubbish in an Italian palazzo may be by Leonardo Da Vinci, art historians said today. Experts believe the work, showing a sorrowful-looking man, is St Jerome because of its exquisite craftsmanship, expressive power and realism is by Da Vinci. Initially the bust, found in the Palazzo Chigi Saracini in Siena was thought to be by Andrea del Verrocchio (1435-1488), who worked at the court of Lorenzo de' Medici in n

Yale U. Defends Its Ownership of Famous Painting by Van Gogh

In 1888, Vincent van Gogh spent three nights painting an image of the café downstairs from his lodgings in Arles, France. In a letter to his brother Theo, he called the painting “one of the ugliest I have done … I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green.” On Monday, Yale University filed a federal lawsuit to establish its title to the painting, “The Night Café,” which was donated to the university in 1960 as part of the estate of Stephen C.